Classlead and Movement Changes [BetaTest]

I have loaded the following changes to our beta server to test for the remaining of the day and tomorrow before we load them into the game. Some of these items are pretty big, including many of the movement changes. If you would like to help out in the beta testing of these skills, please message me in the game and I can try to let your character onto the server. I can only have 10 max people on a beta machine, so you may not be able to get on when you want to.

I will be working on that server for the next couple of days tweaking everything to get it just right. Particularly the new movement changes. Keep in mind that the list below will probably change before they are loaded live.

Classleads

Artifact - Foreboding Stone: Can only be tuned to one person now. TOUCH STONE <target> and will fade after an hour. TOUCH STONE with no target to turn it off.

Artifact - Wand of Reflections: The wand now has 3 charges and they each use will recharge 60 seconds after being used. In addition, you may only use the wand once per second, including on failed attempts.

Artifacts and Rampage - Backflip: Will no longer work in water rooms even if you have the waterwalking defense.

Brutality - Teeth: Decreased the amount of bleeding.

Clotting (All skillsets): This ability will now strictly take a percent of mana. Previously it took a base amount in addition to a percent.

Curses - Swiftcurse: Flare chance changed to 100% when swiftcursing.

Curses - Swiftcurse: Swiftcurse now has 4 charges, which are used when doing swiftcurse. Charges regenerate at a speed equal to twice the balance used when using the curse. Attacking mobs that are not loyal to players or organizations (guards) will not use charges.

Enhancements: You can now instantly change the enhancements on a weapon with the ENHANCE command. You can put 2 or 3 on a weapon depending on if you have the Effectivity ability or not. In addition, you can string the enhancements together. For example ENHANCE <weapon> WITH TEETH RENDING AGONY.

Crystalbinding: Under most circumstances, spinning crystals move to your room automatically as you move now. There is no message associated with this movement.

Curing Messages: The following abilities now have 3rd person messages indicating a cure has happened. Focus Camdus, Heartblood, Kaido Immunity, and Bileshroud.

Maiming - Bloodlet: Now does additional bleeding based on the number of afflictions the target has.

Nightfall - Wraiths: Vigorous and Whispering wraiths now gain charges when you lose health (or mana) and your health (or mana) falls under 75%. Charge can only be gained once every 3 seconds.

Pyroglacia: Removed dizziness from icicles and added recurring freezing instead. It is used with the freezing command.

Pyroglacia and Terratheria: Four new abilities that allow the user to summon elemental minions that assist in bashing in a variety of ways. Check the AB files for FIRE, WATER, EARTH, AIR.

Relic - Aegis: We have reduced the effect of this relic to 15, 25, and 50%.

Sabotage - New Ability - Expunge: Cures a random affliction at a balance and mana cost.

Shamanism - Jinx: Removed from the game.

Shapeshifting - Natureaura: Has been removed as an ability and the speed bonus has been permanently added to anyone in Wyvern form.

Shrines - Perspicacity: You cannot get more than a 1,000,000,000 additional XP from the shrine per game year.

Tarot - Aeon: No longer blocked by speed.

Tarot - Hermit: Now blocked by monolith and similar items if they are in the characters current room.

Thespia: Song messages should use custom harp of harmony messages now.

Thespia: You can no longer sing theraputics, battlemarch, restoration, ward, corescate, empower, requiem, enliven, awakening, or fortify to other players. You now PLAY <song> and anyone you have allied in the room with your, will benefit from that song. You can stop playing a song with the command, STOP PLAYING.

Thespia - Duet: This now lets a character play two songs to the room at the same time. This works with the PLAY <song> change above.

Warchants: Warchants now require less mana, the greater your rage. In addition, that displaced mana will be equally drawn from your target. For example, if you shout would normally take 10 mana, but your rage is at 40%, it will only cost 6 mana and drain your target of 4 mana.

Necromancy and Devotion - Piety and Gravehands: These no longer stack. It will only check the one with the greatest chance of holding you.

Noctu - Flash: Relapse now gives epilepsy to a target if they do not already have it, and only does damage if the target has epilepsy.

Noctu - WhisperingMadness: The speed defence will now block whispering madness. However, if the target is afflicted with AshCloud, it will bypass the speed defense as well.

Voice - Nuarinyu: Frozen has been removed as a possible affliction.

Wyrmriding: You may now ICEWYRM EMOTE <emote>.

Predator, Assassin, Renegade, and Engineer - New Ability - Disable: When used on a boltthrower the boltthrower will be inoperable for 10 minutes.

MOVEMENT UPDATE

Movement bloat in Imperian in a real thing. Over the course of 15 years, we have added so many skills and artifacts that movement is almost meaningless. Instant movement creates problems. First, the size of the world shrinks down to nothing. Second, characters instantly escape all PvP situations at no risk to themselves. Raiders can jump into a city, cause havok, and zip away at no risk to themselves.

The following changes address some of these problems. This should not be too bothersome for most players who are just playing the game. It will increase your time to get some bashing area to bashing area, but it will make some movement skills and artifacts more valuable. It will make those who jump into PK a bit easier to hold down once they start fighting. One of the big things is reducing the ability to instantly escape PK situations by adding some channels to travel skills.

Here is a full list of movement changes:

MOVES PER SECOND and ENDURANCE

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Movement is now directly influenced by your Dexterity and Constitution.

Dexterity determines how many moves you can take per second (Moves Per Second or MPS). Previously this number was out of control. In some cases, 10 or more moves per second. This number, in general, will range from 1 to 5. There is a list below of everything that can change this number.

Constitution now determines how many moves you can take before you need to slow down a little. This number will probably range from 40 to 60 if you have a couple abilities or artifacts. We will call this Endurance (E). This number regenerates by 1 point every second. There is a list below of everything that can change this number.

Example: Imagine your character has a MPS of 3 and an Endurance of 50. You can move 3 rooms per second until you have moved 50 rooms and which point you can only move 1 room per second. (Actually, the number is higher than 50, as you are regaining one endurance point per second while moving).

NOTE: These numbers will be adjusted and effects changed as we test this out in beta.

MPS:

----

Base Rate is determined dexterity. Note that "2" was the previous base rate in the game.

1-9 : 1 MPS

10-11: 2 MPS

12-13: 3 MPS

14-15: 4 MPS

16+ : 5 MPS

Effects that reduce MPS to 1:

Ethereal Chain

Ethereal Shackles

Green Shells

Beast Card

Red Apple

Spatium Flying (If you cannot fly via other means)

Windstorm Rooms

Other Modifications

Crisp Apple: +1 MPS

Rigidity : -2 MPS

Calfshot : -1 MPS per effect level.

Health Modifications

50% Health: 1/2 Total MPS

25% Health: 1 MPS

Endurance:

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You can use *E to see your current endurance in your prompt.

Base Rate is determined Constitution.

1-10: 15

11 : 19

12 : 23

13 : 27

14 : 31

16 : 35

17 : 39

18 : 43

Abilities that modify endurance:

Mounted: +10

Fitness Celerity: +5

Armband of Celerity: +5

Devotion Celerity: +5

Shadowbinding Fleetness: +5

Enslavery Nin'kharsag: +5

Beans: +5 per level

Other cases:

Pathfinding Compass: +10 while using pathfinding

Landstriding: Negates all endurance costs your affinity environment.

Roads and path environments half endurance costs

TELEPORTATION SKILLS

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In addition, all major teleportation skills now have a short channel on them. This channel time increases substantially in most cases if you have taken some type of PvP action (not PVE).

- Movement: The following skills now have a 1-second channel.

- Wayfaring Relic

- Sect Pillar

- Shard Mark

- Bonecasting Raven

- Runelore Raido

- Shapeshifting Track

- Wyrmriding Track

- Tarot Hermit

- Terratheria Windtrack

- Movement: The following skills have a 5 seconds channel if you have been PvP aggressive in the last 60 seconds.

- Wayfaring Relic

- Sect Pillar

- Shard Mark

- Bonecasting Raven

- Runelore Raido

- Terratheria Windtrack

No changes were made to these instant abilities. This is because they are random, require set up, or a very situational.

Grain of salt because I haven't seen the numbers, but if deathknight can't one shot the shred in a single teeth proc anymore the class won't work (will basically be templar before these changes) (*). This is mostly why I recommended teeth only firing if someone is below x bleeding - they need that one shot shred, but giving them that on every other dsl is extreme.

Outside of that I like the changes though, looks cool.

* If someone wants to test it, the combo that should give haemophilia with no prep is combo slash shred (slash first) with a teeth enhancement and a non-artefact longsword.

Grain of salt because I haven't seen the numbers, but if deathknight can't one shot the shred in a single teeth proc anymore the class won't work (will basically be templar before these changes) (*). This is mostly why I recommended teeth only firing if someone is below x bleeding - they need that one shot shred, but giving them that on every other dsl is extreme.

Outside of that I like the changes though, looks cool.

* If someone wants to test it, the combo that should give haemophilia with no prep is combo slash shred (slash first) with a teeth enhancement and a non-artefact longsword.

Right. What we will do is this. Normal teeth bleeding until you are over the shred threshold, and then it will taper off.

1. Do Predators get Expunge in addition to Shrugging, or does it replace it?2. Does the Enhance swap in Weaponmastery replace the ability to fight with two swords?3. How does DEVOTION - CRUSADE work? I don't see a classlead for it.4. Is there a counter to Sabotage - Disable? For example, will Engineering - Repair make it operable again?

Think it is in addition to. AB listings themselves aren't loaded, but both buttons seem to work.

Message #2062 Sent By: (imperian) Received On: 1/20/2018/2:59"Antioch has filed a bounty against you. Reason: Raiding Antioch and stealing Bina, being a rightass, and not belonging anywhere near Antioch till he grows up."

1. Do Predators get Expunge in addition to Shrugging, or does it replace it?2. Does the Enhance swap in Weaponmastery replace the ability to fight with two swords?3. How does DEVOTION - CRUSADE work? I don't see a classlead for it.4. Is there a counter to Sabotage - Disable? For example, will Engineering - Repair make it operable again?

1. In addition to shrugging for now.2. I don't think it "replaces" it, but I am not sure I understand the question completely.3. Classlead 535 for the most part. But I may tweak it slightly tomorrow.4. No, but that is a good idea. Will play with that as well.

I wanted to release this tomorrow, but we may wait another day for these little changes and a couple more.

If someone wants to test it, the combo that should give haemophilia with no prep is combo slash shred (slash first) with a teeth enhancement and a non-artefact longsword.

That doesn't even work on live right now, strictly speaking.. The first time you do this combo it doesn't cause enough bleeding to proc teeth. (non artifact sword, clever statpack) .

On second combo, teeth proc, but that seems easily defeatable by clotting to full between combos.

More in depth to what Septus said, your weapon should be serrated infused or serrated sharp(I preferred infused), and clever -may- not give you the strength you need to get the damage/bleed threshold. The main statpack is usually athletic. Also things you can do to increase the damage is use a whetstone on the sword, and make sure your proficiency is set to longsword. I think that cover the very specific stuff. I can't think of anything else that you would need(or any knight for that matter)

If someone wants to test it, the combo that should give haemophilia with no prep is combo slash shred (slash first) with a teeth enhancement and a non-artefact longsword.

That doesn't even work on live right now, strictly speaking.. The first time you do this combo it doesn't cause enough bleeding to proc teeth. (non artifact sword, clever statpack) .

On second combo, teeth proc, but that seems easily defeatable by clotting to full between combos.

More in depth to what Septus said, your weapon should be serrated infused or serrated sharp(I preferred infused), and clever -may- not give you the strength you need to get the damage/bleed threshold. The main statpack is usually athletic. Also things you can do to increase the damage is use a whetstone on the sword, and make sure your proficiency is set to longsword. I think that cover the very specific stuff. I can't think of anything else that you would need(or any knight for that matter)

Thanks, there are obviously a few things I forgot after being gone from the game for 2 years. Whetstone didn't even occur to me.

However, after getting my strength up to 14 (base athletic) and whetstoning my sword, I still can't get the combo to fire. Armor doesn't matter for bleeding at all, I get the same bleeding whether I'm wearing fullplate or nothing at all. However, the longsword I've been testing with is serrated light, which is probably the source of the problem, as 25% is a significant chunk of damage. Sadly I can't find a serrated sword that isn't also light in any shop

If someone wants to test it, the combo that should give haemophilia with no prep is combo slash shred (slash first) with a teeth enhancement and a non-artefact longsword.

That doesn't even work on live right now, strictly speaking.. The first time you do this combo it doesn't cause enough bleeding to proc teeth. (non artifact sword, clever statpack) .

On second combo, teeth proc, but that seems easily defeatable by clotting to full between combos.

More in depth to what Septus said, your weapon should be serrated infused or serrated sharp(I preferred infused), and clever -may- not give you the strength you need to get the damage/bleed threshold. The main statpack is usually athletic. Also things you can do to increase the damage is use a whetstone on the sword, and make sure your proficiency is set to longsword. I think that cover the very specific stuff. I can't think of anything else that you would need(or any knight for that matter)

Thanks, there are obviously a few things I forgot after being gone from the game for 2 years. Whetstone didn't even occur to me.

However, after getting my strength up to 14 (base athletic) and whetstoning my sword, I still can't get the combo to fire. Armor doesn't matter for bleeding at all, I get the same bleeding whether I'm wearing fullplate or nothing at all. However, the longsword I've been testing with is serrated light, which is probably the source of the problem, as 25% is a significant chunk of damage. Sadly I can't find a serrated sword that isn't also light in any shop

Yeah. If you are looking in khandava my old character bought the last few remaining. And khandava was the only place you could really find serrated/infused longswords which at the time I was dk you pretty much needed to dual wield longswords, and sometimes even juggle 3. Your best bet is to ask over the market for a smith to specifically make them for you. I think making them of mostly bone ingots made it cheaper to make too, which you can create those via necromancy. Another thing I forgot was that there is a animation form (I think? It's like one of the last skills in necromancy) That gives you extra strength which is what I always used as well, though I think people used the con form more. I dunno if that will help.

Infused is pretty irrelevant for this to be honest - I just need something that's not light.I know about lich, that's how I've been able to match my strength to what baseline Athletic strength would be.

This is an aside, but out of curiosity, what's the point of double wielding longswords? Enhancement cooldowns are per person, not per weapon. When I was playing DK two years ago, I had 2 swords, a light/serrated one with teeth/agony to build a bleed stack and heavy/infused one with soulquench/fleshburn/negate to burn down. That was also the reason to play clever DK because soulquench/soulstorm damage was controlled by your intellect. Don't know if that's still the case. Anyway, the real point though, is that I don't understand the philosophy of having the bleed requirement on teeth where it is, or why have it at all for that matter. It seems unduly punishing to less than optimal statpacks and weapon setups. Trigger requirements on other enhancements make sense to me, the general philosophy behind them is that if you are able to get a strategy rolling, they will then, ahem, enhance your strategy. The problem with teeth is that unless you are able to trigger it on your first swing, there really isn't anything you can do to step into it. So you have a very binary situation where you either have the statpack/gear combination to start a bleed strategy rolling or you don't. If you are not playing the right combination, your bleed ramp up isn't slower, it just doesn't happen.I actually sort of do understand why it was designed that way initially, because without some limiting boundary on teeth, you could step into a self-ramping bleed cycle from the first swing, but that was addressed with the change to teeth in this classlead. And the developers clearly don't think that a teeth/shred on the first swing is bad, because with the right stat and gear you can trigger it no problem. The only reasonable rationale might be if the developers think that an on-demand activated shred with the speed of light is unbalanced, but even that's dubious, first of all, because light combo is a whopping 0.09 seconds faster at a cost of significant bleed loss (so your bleed build up would be slower, especially now, with a tapered teeth - that's your trade off), and secondly, you actually can probably stack enough strength to trigger teeth even with light longsword and you can certainly do it with an artifact one. Anyway, classlead just went live so it's too late for all that, but just something to think about.

While I definitely think 50% is too strong for L3 still, it doesn't solve the core issue of disparate effect of sanc/defiles that skew it more heavily to the defender than just "I get to fight in this position I probably fortified with helpful relics nearby for at least twice as many fights." It should reduce sanc amounts by the same level, at least.

The endurance changes while good also have some drawbacks especially aimed towards the higher geared players.

In my samples I ran today...I did my normal Necropolis runs and each time I was constantly having to sit to regain my endurance back. I don't care about having to stop and catch my breath/and I understand the need for some form of monitor on movement speeds. Though given the low tier health pools mobs have and the speed at which a person of Tyden's artifact/stats/etc bashes at I find the process of having to constantly sit/stand or just constantly catch my breath to be a bit on the overkill side of things.

To be absolutely clear: I do not mind resting/sitting, in fact I welcome the change to endurance. However, it feels that my high end character is suffering extremely hard due to how effortlessly it is to kill mobs. Take what you will from this post, but figured I'd chime in some.

I am going to wait to suggest possible tweaks, mainly just wanted to state my experience.

The latest endurance iteration feels meh. Getting rid of the MPS outliers (and cutting into dash's effectiveness) is basically all it does, and it could go farther with that. With the config, I don't have to worry about ever draining myself of E as long as I toggle off dashing on my end. Yeah, the previous version was hitting some during hunting, but that was with my basher in larger wave areas and it was negligible after the regen rate and E from mob kills was added.

My suggestions were just going to be looking at some environ changes in hunting areas (Making the middle line of Necro path would do a lot, for example) and making the E gain from bash exp to not punish grouping. Then this weirdness with extra commands that people are going to be confused about and not really stopping me from making it to basically anywhere within my E bar? Bleh

tl;dr this version of the movement changes could have been implemented by "Make everyone move at 3 MPS." I dun like it.

We went too far with post-live feedback, imo. Really eliminated the point of these changes, which is dumb. Movement bloat isn't really 'under control' with this latest patch to it. Movement basically feels the same now as it did on Monday.

Message #2062 Sent By: (imperian) Received On: 1/20/2018/2:59"Antioch has filed a bounty against you. Reason: Raiding Antioch and stealing Bina, being a rightass, and not belonging anywhere near Antioch till he grows up."

Yeah, the new version feels like it's only going to hit me if I'm doing a gemhunt and even then it won't be particularly meaningful. I get that some people hated the new changes so much they were foaming at the mouth angry, but I feel like once endurance-on-kill got added it was perfect.

The last version of endurance was fine. You wouldn't run out unless you did something like try to speedwalk across most of the continent, and even then, it wouldn't slow you down much. Once endurance on kill was added when bashing, that meant you'd hardly feel it bashing, unless you had a very iffy system and ended up speedwalking around an area with next to no mobs. Then you might actually run out of endurance.

The last version did what the changes were meant to do: Cut down the top end of speed without making movement too painful. Yes, if you were used to fully arti'd up moves per second speedwalking, you'd probably feel a noticeable slowdown, but not by much. The one exception to this was speedwalking with a pathfinder compass, which unless I'm mistaken, could hit 9 rooms per second. That was ridiculous and needed to change.

I get that for some people 'QoL' and convenience are everything, but sometimes you have to accept that a change that inconveniences you is still good for the game overall. If you can't do that, you're going to have problems playing any multiplayer game.

I was one of those fast-moving people. I took full advantage of that. It was kind of fun bashing, and gemhunting, and just getting around - But I recognised that it made the world feel too small, that it made travel skills and artifacts less valuable and it also meant people just couldn't keep up with people who had both the move speed artifacts/skills and good scripts. I don't feel the current iteration of endurance goes quite far enough in terms of slowing people down and I'd personally like to see it go back to what it was before, with the following tweak:

- Base move speed of 2 average rooms/second when low on endurance.

Those that abhorred the endurance update didn't even give it time to settle in before kicking up a loud fuss, it feels like.

The last version of endurance was fine. You wouldn't run out unless you did something like try to speedwalk across most of the continent, and even then, it wouldn't slow you down much. Once endurance on kill was added when bashing, that meant you'd hardly feel it bashing, unless you had a very iffy system and ended up speedwalking around an area with next to no mobs. Then you might actually run out of endurance.

The last version did what the changes were meant to do: Cut down the top end of speed without making movement too painful. Yes, if you were used to fully arti'd up moves per second speedwalking, you'd probably feel a noticeable slowdown, but not by much. The one exception to this was speedwalking with a pathfinder compass, which unless I'm mistaken, could hit 9 rooms per second. That was ridiculous and needed to change.

I get that for some people 'QoL' and convenience are everything, but sometimes you have to accept that a change that inconveniences you is still good for the game overall. If you can't do that, you're going to have problems playing any multiplayer game.

I was one of those fast-moving people. I took full advantage of that. It was kind of fun bashing, and gemhunting, and just getting around - But I recognised that it made the world feel too small, that it made travel skills and artifacts less valuable and it also meant people just couldn't keep up with people who had both the move speed artifacts/skills and good scripts. I don't feel the current iteration of endurance goes quite far enough in terms of slowing people down and I'd personally like to see it go back to what it was before, with the following tweak:

- Base move speed of 2 average rooms/second when low on endurance.

Those that abhorred the endurance update didn't even give it time to settle in before kicking up a loud fuss, it feels like.

I think a lot of the issue is we live in an instant gratification age. No one logs in to spend time walking around. Making movement slow is rough in a game that is already falling to graphical games that give instant gratification through a lot of in game things, especially movement via teleportation and such. Granted graphical games are more massive in space to cover, but it's just the age we live in.